Printer Perfection

I actually called another company first and they referred Printer Perfection. I called and they sent a technician the next day. He fixed and cleaned my printer in about an hour. Problem solved. Thanks.

My Ricoh Afficio printer was printing black text as fuzzy dark gray/pink text on white paper. Based on my Angie's List search I e-mailed "Clickaway Computers" (who received a grade of "A" and a "Super Service Award") with my problem, including the fact that the printer/copier was too big to bring into their shop. They called me back within the hour to say they didn't work on Ricoh machines, but they recommended "Printer Perfection" and gave me the phone number. I called Printer Perfection and described my problem to their voice mail. The next morning, Dan from Printer Perfection called back, apologizing for not returning my call the same day I made it. We discussed the problem, he gave me an estimate of what it would cost and we set up an appointment for him to check it out. Dan arrived on time and he thoroughly cleaned, tested and reset all the "consumables" on the unit. He then ran a self-test print from the printer (not using the computer) and showed me a perfect test print with no fuzzy gray text. After I followed his suggestion to print a page from a Word doc, from a PDF, etc. and they were all still fuzzy, I knew he was right and that the computer itself was the problem and not the printer or a specific application. He convinced me to install a new driver (which I had already done previously in an attempt to solve the problem myself) but as I repeated the steps to do it, he suggested I let the computer create a new queue when it asked me that question (which I hadn't done before). Apparently that deletes the printer so I went ahead to "add a printer" to re-install it. Voila! That solved the problem and my text was clearly black again! While Dan was here, he gave me a number of tips for future care/maintenance and problem solving for the Ricoh as well as the status of the consumables. I asked him to look at an old HP printer that was feeding multiple sheets of paper when it should have just fed a single sheet. He determined which part was worn out but said that replacing that part required taking apart the whole printer and the cost of doing so would be more than a new printer would cost. He also cleaned and tested that printer. Dan only charged me for one hour of labor, even though he was here longer than that. I ranked him "A" in every category except quality of service because I actually fixed the problem myself (ha ha) and Angie's List doesn't have a grade of "A-". I learned a lot for future reference and I would definitely recommend Printer Perfection to a friend, or use them again myself.